In 2025 we can watch our world ending.

Thoughts for Australia from the Ukraine betrayal.

The world has changed, and our leaders try to pretend it hasn’t.

The world watched the leader of an American client state be ambushed by the President and Vice President live on TV and this makes it a very, very important time for other American satrapies, like our own here in Australia, to consider our position extremely carefully.

Being a current American ally is an expensive and often humiliating business.

Having to sign up to whatever idiot mania is sweeping the US is bad enough. (How is the War on Drugs going?)

However bad that can be the process of becoming a former American ally is often terminal for the nations betrayed. (Just ask the South Vietnamese)

Since 15 February 1942 and the fall of Singapore (put a pin in that date, we’ll be circling around it) Australia has hopefully tried to substitute the United States as a great and powerful friend replacing our former place in the British Empire.

This is despite numerous prominent Americans, from Douglas Macarthur onwards, trying to warn us, in a kindly sort of way, that Washington doesn’t view the world in the soft hearted manner that London did for it’s colonial dominions (or at least the ones with white majorities to put not too fine a point on the racism inherent to this view)

But Australia is a very big country with very few Australians in it. So American business concerns could run riot in the Australian interior with only occasional questions asked about why all the water was being used to grow cotton in a desert? Or why the petroleum companies don’t pay any tax?

To generations of Australian leaders it seemed like a good deal, an acceptable price to pay for security.

(But let’s remember the roll call of Australian Prime Ministers who lost office when they strayed too far from American desires. Gough Whitlam was the most famous but I would also add to the list John Gorton, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, and Malcolm Turnbull.)

But what is an American security guarantee worth?

Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited in the breakup of the Soviet Union in exchange for written security guarantees.

Barack Obama chose to render those worthless when the Ukraine conflict began in 2014. Betraying client states is a bipartisan position after all.

Interesting parallel there. Australia has abundant uranium and in fact conducted, with the British, numerous nuclear weapon tests before deciding against pursuing an independent nuclear arsenal. The US preferred its client states to not have independent nuclear capabilities, which when you consider how badly they treat their clients is a very sensible position.

Moving forward the Biden administration constantly encouraged Ukraine to provoke the Russians in the lead up to 2022. Ukraine was promised that if Russia responded they would have the necessary support to deal with the response.

That turned out to be a particularly bitter betrayal. Western aid to Ukraine since 2022 has always been just enough to keep the fight going, but not enough to win, to defeat the Russians in the field and drive them out of the country.

(Now this is in no way a defence of Russia’s disgusting invasion. They started a war of aggression and should be judged for that. But we are not reliant on Russia for our national wellbeing.)

So the “good guy” Democrats had already done quite the number on Ukraine even before the orange sun king returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

To return to Australian parallels our navy and air force have been engaged in large scale provocations of China, particularly in the South China Sea, egged on by Americans promising they’d support us against any retaliation.

That American support extended to taking our export markets in China when we inevitably lost market access as a result of our actions and rhetoric.

It is not hard to imagine an Australian Prime Minister sitting in the oval office being abused for failing to be strong the way Zelensky was this week.

This presents the Australian political class with a uniquely awful position. Attempts at policy independence from the US lead to swift removal from power in this country. Australia as a whole might not get a lot of benefit from American business activity in this country, but our oligarchs are entirely reliant on their place in the American system, and our democracy can be toppled by ad campaigns running to no more than tens of millions of dollars. (The mining tax debacle of the Rudd government being the easiest recent example to present).

And so we had the bizarre spectacle of our entire political class this weekend claiming to “Stand with the Ukraine” while being “100% committed to the US alliance”.

To be fair to them fronting the cameras and saying “we’re up a brown creek without a paddle” would not go well. The new world needs to be at least partially built before it can be sold to the public.

There’s probably not a lot to be done, aside from maintaining pretences as long as we can.

If we were capable of rational national policy making we’d be looking to restore and rebuild independent national capabilities. But as mentioned above that’s a career limiting move for an Australian Prime Minister.

In 1942 we were lucky that the US needed a friendly supply base in the South Western Pacific. And we spoke the “right” language, and our skin was the “right” colour.

In 2025 we’re a big wealthy nation of 28 million people. Instead of looking for great and powerful friends it’s past time to be our own best friend.